According to what was published by Wired magazine on its website, Oxford University epidemiologist Moritz Kramer first heard about the spread of the new monkeypox disease in Britain, Europe and the United States, through the social networking site Twitter, and not through traditional scientific channels, or from an agency UK Health Security, where every suspected case has been reported.
As infectious disease experts exchanged their theories, Cramer, who specializes in modeling the spread of infectious diseases, was increasingly concerned.
“We realized that this outbreak was unusual in its geographic expansion, with some non-travel-related populations spreading,” Kramer said.
In the past, when monkeypox appeared in Europe or North America, cases could have been easily traced back to countries where the virus was circulating, but this is not the case for this disease.
Trace the ways monkeypox spreads
To keep abreast of how the virus spreads, Cramer, John Brownstein and colleagues at the World Health Organization (WHO) created the “Monkeypox Tracking System” to gather information on confirmed and suspected cases, a tool that accurately visualizes all that is unfamiliar about the new outbreak.
Although monkeypox is endemic to West and Central Africa, it is not known to be particularly transmissible, as it was first discovered in monkeys in 1958, but rodents and other small mammals are believed to be the main animal host, and the virus is transmitted more commonly Through close contact between these organisms and humans, it causes people to develop a fever, as well as a severe rash.
This disease can also be spread between humans, either through respiratory droplets or body fluids of an infected person, but this is less common, because monkeypox is not contagious until the time symptoms appear on the infected person, and when symptoms appear, contacts become more susceptible to infection, while The patient is recovering and should avoid contact with others.
Some of the longest documented transmission chains for the virus are just 6 consecutive person-to-person infections, said Mathieu Prochaska, an epidemiologist at the UK’s Health Security Agency.
But as the “monkeypox tracking” system shows, clusters of cases suddenly appear around the world without clear links to the endemic countries. So far, Britain has the most number of confirmed cases “57”, along with injuries in Portugal and Spain, but There are cases that have also appeared as far away as Canada and Australia.
Some scientists initially speculated that a new, more transmissible form of monkeypox might have emerged, but now that the first viral genome sequences from the outbreak have been published they seem to indicate otherwise.
Eradication of smallpox causes deterioration of immunity
It is likely that this outbreak of the disease may have arisen from cases that appeared initially within parts of Africa, combined with the rise in air travel after the end of epidemic restrictions, and the waning of immunity against orthopoxviruses, the viral family that contains monkeypox, cowpox, smallpox, and others, through Vast areas of the planet.
University of California at Los Angeles professor Jamie Lloyd Smith, who has been studying monkeypox for more than a decade, says that immunity to this family of viruses has been deteriorating in humans since the eradication of smallpox in 1980.
Smith added: “Eradication of smallpox represents one of the greatest public health achievements of all time, but the natural result of eradicating the orthopox virus, which has spread widely among humans, is that the vaccination program that led to its eradication has been stopped, leaving generations of people without immune experience. With any orthopoxvirus, there is no doubt that this makes life easier for monkeypox, because it is like a big pile of fuel that has never seen a spark.”
sexual transmission
The UK’s Occupational Health and Safety Services has suggested that the routes of transmission could be sexual, based on data showing that a proportion of confirmed cases are sexual among men. These conclusions are at this early stage of the outbreak.
A researcher at Emory University in the United States, Bogoma Tetangi, who has studied past outbreaks of monkeypox, says: “I don’t like to speculate because I don’t think it’s useful and it might feed misinformation… Sexual transmission is always a possible way to spread any disease that can be transmitted through physical contact. close”.
Monkeypox infection is less likely to spread
Monkeypox is less transmissible than the Corona virus, as the average number of people who will catch the virus from an infected person is between one to two, in comparison, Corona has a reproduction number higher than 7.
The genetic sequencing also shows that the new outbreak is a West African strain, which has a mortality rate of less than 1 percent.
So far, no severely symptomatic patient has been detected, and two vaccines are already available in Europe and North America to prevent the disease, even if either of them is used for up to 4 days after a person is exposed to the virus.
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